This is the official Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list for the KioskForge project.
Please feel free to submit more questions in the issue tracker at GitHub. Alternatively you can mail me the issue and I'll create a new issue, if needed.
The team can be contacted directly by mail at
contact@kioskforge.org.
If you have a GitHub account, please use the official issue tracker in the KioskForge repository found at:
This section contains various common questions about technical issues with KioskForge.
This is most likely because you have misspelled the Wi-Fi network
name or are using a wrong password. Please notice that both are case
sensitive so that Test WiFi is different from
Test WIFI. You need to spell both precisely as given to
you.
The values of wifi_country and wifi_hidden
also need to be correct, although this is mostly important when
accessing 5G+ networks using the AC+ standards.
A tip is to try to create a new connection with your phone to see if that works. If either the Wi-Fi network name or the password is incorrect, it will fail too.
As a rule of thumb, we recommend MicroSD cards over USB keys because the latter tend to become very hot and then malfunction.
As for MicroSD cards, it depends on how long the kiosk is expected to operate. If it is to be deployed for weeks, months, or a few years, virtually any MicroSD card should do. If you plan the kiosk to operate for a decade or so, then you should probably buy an "industrial grade" card, which includes wear leveling, which again reduces wear on the card very significantly. I know that SanDisk and Kingston both produce MicroSD cards named "... Industrial", both of which include wear leveling. These cards are typically a couple of times more expensive than plain, non-wear-leveling cards, but I think the money is well spent because if your kiosk suddenly dies from a MicroSD failure, you'll probably waste hours dismounting, reforging, and remounting the kiosk.
If you have experience or knowledge that contradict the above, please feel free to alert me on mail.
As of this writing, less than half a megabyte. This is negible and should not cause any concern on your part.
All files created by and used by KioskForge are located in
~/KioskForge. Please do not remove this folder as
it is required.
The setup script, KioskSetup.py, intentionally
copies KioskForge.py (the main program) onto the target for
posterity.
root after login?You should generally try to avoid becoming root, and
instead use the sudo command with the shell
user, but if you really need to, you can use this procedure:
# Log into the kiosk as the 'shell' user using SSH or local login.
# Execute the commands below and fill in the requested passwords.
sudo -s
# Enter password for the 'shell' user at the prompt.
passwd
# Enter NEW password for the 'root' user at the prompt.
# Retype NEW password for the 'root' user at the prompt.This step is only done the very first time you su to
root. Unfortunately, there's no way we can do this automatically.
set chanspec 0xNNNN fail, reason -52I'm pretty sure these were caused by the lack of the
wifi_country option in pre-v0.20 releases of KioskForge.
Basically, the network driver was complaining that an incorrect channel
was attempted selected because the Ubuntu Server Wi-Fi subsystem did not
know the correct country for the network card. The new
wifi_country option is used to tell the Wi-Fi subsystem the
legal set of channels that can and may be used in the kiosk.
I have not seen these errors since v0.20, so please let me know if they suddenly pop up again.
apt is already using a lock file?KioskForge tries to take the fact that apt is a rude
process, that keeps meddling with central lock files at arbitrary times,
into consideration (apt runs in the background even if the
package unattended-upgrades has been completely removed),
by waiting for the lock files to be unlocked again, so you should not
run into this issue.
If you run into this issue, please report it.
The most likely reason of this issue is that your installation media, typically a MicroSD card, is becoming worn and unreliable from overuse. Another possibility is that your USB key is too hot, which happens quite often.
Try with another installation media (USB key or another MicroSD card), and the error(s) should disappear.
If the problem persists, report it as a bug. It may be some obscure error in KioskForge.
This section contains various common questions about the development of KioskForge.
For the time being, I am very happy about Ubuntu Server (which I use and have used as a web server for a decade or so), so this is not very likely.
I could theoretically add support for a host of Linux distributions, but I don't really see the point. Ubuntu Server is free, very stable, and well documented. The software is also reasonably up-to-date and security issues get fixed quite quickly in my experience.
Adding support for a single target platform takes weeks or months, as Linux is a mess when it comes to administration of the operating system. Almost every distro does things in its own way and I, honestly, don't feel like battling a lost war on the intricacies of a bunch of Linux distros.
Debian could potentially become a candiate to be supported by
KioskForge sometime down the road as because Ubuntu is based upon Debian
and also because Ubuntu is getting rather annoying these days (snaps,
snaps, snaps, everywhere even thought the technology is only half baked
yet). Chromium (the open source variant of the Chrome web browser) has
been quite a bit of pain to work with because it is a snap, not a
standard Ubuntu apt package.
No, the problem is that PCs are non-standard in every way, from CPU to graphics to audio and so on. I prefer to make KioskForge as stable and reliable as at all possible, instead of having to support a crazy number of possible and real PC builds.
Supporting only two very standard target platforms, at the time of this writing, makes my job a lot easier and hopefully yields a stable, trustworthy, and flexible product that you and others can use for free.
I originally wrote the first version of KioskForge in Bash, because it was very simple in the beginning, but soon missed Python and its way more intuitive and logical environment.
In short: Because Python v3.x is preinstalled on many Linux distributions and because Python is a great scripting language.
This is work in progress, pretty soon you will be able to use KioskForge on both Windows and Linux. Feel free to request this.
I don't have any Apple boxes and don't feel like spending a fortune on adding support for a platform that I don't use myself.
Not likely.
It could do this by using the wmi package for Python (as
RPI requires a physical drive to be specified). But I am much more
focused on making a Linux newbie friendly solution than offering all
sorts of gimmicks. It is important to me, and most users, that they can
launch KioskForge simply by double-clicking it without having any
technical knowledge of Python, Linux, and kiosks as such, so I won't be
exploring this path anytime soon.
Also, I sleep better knowing that people can't accidentally erase important data using KioskForge.